


Articulated Antiquities

by pipisafoat



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Language of Flowers, Old-Fashioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 15:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9392324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipisafoat/pseuds/pipisafoat
Summary: It starts with a red rose, and that’s enough to rouse her curiosity.





	

**Author's Note:**

> vague spoilers for 2x25 (Resolutions); takes place literally any time after that
> 
> written for fandomweekly theme prompt #028: Old-Fashioned

It starts with a red rose, and that’s enough to rouse her curiosity. She only knows one person who gives her roses - who gives anyone roses, actually - but his are never red. When she lifts the flower from her ready room desk to put it in the newly-replicated vase of water, she finds a padd underneath with a proposal for a faster route through the sector of space they were approaching. It turns out to be a good plan, so she has Tom Paris change the course.

The second flower comes almost a week later, after she yells at B’elanna and storms out of Engineering to hide in her ready room and definitely not cry from frustration and lost hope. Three stems tied together with a white ribbon are transported directly onto her desk, but the ensign in the transporter room shows no record of a transport. She has to search the ship’s database to find it, but the small white buds belong to angelica. A note in the database says that the flower was believed to encourage inspiration, encouragement, and restfulness when given as a gift for someone depressed or stressed. It sounds like an accurate description of her mood of late, and the simple thought of someone looking up the meanings of flowers just to speak to her does encourage her. She adds the angelica to her rose’s vase, holds her head high, and steps back out onto the bridge.

Clematis is the next flower, and the meaning of it is buried in details on how to plant it, like that matters while on a starship in the Delta Quadrant. She decides that the mental beauty and ingenuity it represents must be a silent praise of her latest plan to speed their journey home, and she clips a flower before she can think too hard about it and wears it opposite her communicator badge.

She finally remembers to look up the meaning of that first flower, the red rose, and she’s not disappointed - it means love, the most straight-forward and expected meaning for a first floral contact. It seems clear that her suitor didn’t expect her to find the meanings behind the flowers initially.

Yellow acacia’s meaning of true friendship sends her for a loop - is he backing away from the previous messages? - until she finds a reference to secret love in a linked database entry. There’s only one person she can call a true friend on this ship, and secret love (not to mention the whole concept of communicating in flowers instead of coming out and saying it) is 100% him.

She purposefully slips up and calls Chakotay an angry warrior on the bridge one day, and she’s not surprised at all when he shows up for their dinner that evening with a bouquet of small blue flowers. She shushes him before he can say a word and sits at her desk to quickly find the name and meaning of them, which turn out to be one in the same - forget-me-not, true love that can’t be lost to time. No, she hasn’t forgotten their time on New Earth, and she imagines she never will. 

(The next time she sends him on an away mission, it’s expected to last several days, and she slips a replicated jasmine flower into his bag while he’s in the shower to remind him of her even while they’re apart. She has white dittany cued up in her replicator for his return, though she doesn’t think they need flowers anymore to show their love, and she’s completely certain they don’t need the aphrodisiacal qualities it boasts.)


End file.
